Best & Worst 2009
This is totally off the top of my head. I know I'll regret this as commentators come up with better ideas that I should have thought of but didn't, but at least I'm getting the ball rolling, hmmm? Like that bill coming out of Washington B.C., you can improve on it later, right? No? You're stuck with it? Gaaak!
BEST
1: Nanotech is coming on strong
Throughout the decade, everybody told me "forget nano, watch bio." And indeed, biology is quickly becoming putty in our hands. (Biology as programmable code: good.) But as John Smart opined at the humanity plus summit, there have been amazing nanotech breakthroughs in 2009. (Matter as programmable code: better.) We covered some of them, and I'm sure we missed a few.
'NanoPen' may write new chapter in nanotechnology manufacturing
Industrial Nanotech Breakthrough?
How Close Are We To Real Nanotechnology?
2: Cognitive Liberty is on the Rise (Yeah, I'm talkin' about decriminalized mind altering drugs again)
For starters, we've got ravingly positive reports from what we might call "The Portugal Experiment," where they decriminalized all drugs. Then we have the Czech Republic's recent decriminalization of -- essentially -- plant drugs for personal use, an interesting approach that has been long advocated by Andrew Weil. And in the good old USA, which has long been the vanguard of hardass anti-drug politics, we're seeing a trend towards leaving medical marijuana alone and even a growing trend toward legalization. That's barely dipping the toe in the water in terms of solving the problems caused by prohibition. Imagine the positive effect on Mexico if we started growing and manufacturing our own product here, legally? Imagine the positive effect on Afghanistan if we started buying more of their product (and let's not forget that Afghani hashish) legitimately.
3: Dollhouse Rocks 2 Hour Episodes
Sure, we featured Eliza Dushku on the cover of our winter edition and ran a think piece by Erik Davis about the show... and then word came out that Fox was going to ditch the series. And yes, many critics found the first season less than completely compelling. But starting in December, Joss Whedon and company came out swinging hard with several serious, twistingly complex, bordering-on-P.K. Dickian 2 hour episodes that have many naysayers eating their words. Indeed, the theme seems to be moving ever closer to "YOU are the Doll" -- the title of our Davis piece. Did Whedon read the cover story and push it in this direction? Will Rossum Corporation reprogram the entire human race? Can this show be saved? I try to be my best.
4: Obama Sets Our Stem Cells Free!
As always, it involved some compromise, but new stem cell policies have led to new availability. Another boost for regenerative medicine -- grow your own body parts.
Embryonic Stem-Cell Lines Made Available
5: Transcendent Man Kinda Makes Ya Think
Those in the transhumanism community either love him or... like him but think he's wrong... but either way, with the film Transcendent Man hitting the film festival circuit, Ray Kurzweil is getting some otherwise not clued in members of the intelligentsia to talk about the future in more interesting ways than... "Oh Shit! Our social security will run out in 2030."
WORST
1: This So-Called Economy
The whole thing: the "recession," the "national debts," the foreclosures, the finance/banker bailouts, the suffering caused by unemployment (and worse in poorer parts of the world), the bankruptcies... the paying of tribute to the people who lend and gamble the money through "bailouts," which they then lend back to us with interest. To paraphrase an old at&t ad from the '90s: "Did you ever feel like a serf in the middle ages? You will!" By the way, are there less resources, less products, less skill and creativity, less willingness to work (and play) and create value now than there was five or ten years ago? So what's the problem?
2: The Trail of Broken Promises (Obama Administration)
I always purchase my hope with a healthy dose of skepticism, but one does -- in fact -- hope for the best. But, as beat poet John Giorno once wailed, "EVERYBODY IS A COMPLETE DISAPPOINTMENT!" Rather than sharing my personal list of what has outraged me, I'll quote from a David Sirota column calling out the cynicism behind the idea that sophisticates shouldn't take candidate's campaign promises at all seriously: "These 'candidate versus president' idioms are standard among Beltway elites who belong to what New York University's Jay Rosen calls 'The Church of the Savvy.' Their catechism says that anyone demanding a president deliver on campaign promises is naive because, allegedly, there is an inherent difference between what a candidate can tell voters and what that candidate can support as president. Those rejecting this 'savvy' interpretation are therefore lambasted as petulant children who refuse to 'take off their pajamas' and 'get dressed.' (Full article here.)
Actually, in the spirit that campaign promises should not be taken seriously, perhaps it's time for another R.U. Sirius candidacy in 2012. Here are my campaign promises:
1: I will clean up after the Mayan apocalypse
2: I will get everybody ready for The Singularity
3: I will stop whatever things you personally think is bad... NOW!
3: The Music Industry Empire Strikes Back In Europe
We saw more draconian action against sharing music, with Europe and particularly England, leading the pack. On November 20, Cory Doctorow reported on Boing Boing: "Peter Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary... says he's planning to appoint private militias financed by rightsholder groups who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files or the blocking of websites, and Mandelson will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any transgression he deems you are guilty of." Cory's full post.
4: Terminator Salvation
Oh but we had fun in advance of Terminator Salvation, publishing one web article after another about the rise of the robot soliders. And then... we saw the movie. Ouch!
Foolish Meatstack! Terminator Week Continues
5: Transhumanist v. Transhumanist
The left glove came off as tensions surfaced between the transhumanist left and the transhumanist libertarians. As a hybrid, I'm bemused -- but then bemused is my middle name (That's what the U stands for.) Hey, some of my best friends are (fill in the blanks). This awkward alliance (liberal and libertarian) has supplied most of the participants in many important scenes such as: the EFF, various anti-drug war groups, various civil liberties groups, various antiwar movements... and most importantly -- every great party full of weirdo geeks you've ever attended. So argue away, but play nice. After all, those other assholes plan to be around for a quadrillion years too.
Editor's Blog
Read and comment on blog posts from h+ editor RU Sirius and others.
Recent Comments
-
By the way, know what? I said the whole "risk to being reduced to pets" was an idle question, but if you want me to play at this game, I will...
-
Don't want to hijack this thread in a Randian apologia direction, especially since I do find her elitism more than a bit off-putting (though I do...
-
>If we can't define intelligence then the project of attempting to create it will always be incoheren
No, we can't define exactly...
-
Have you actually read anything Rand ever wrote? Or did you get that idea purely from other people who also haven't read anything Rand ever wrote...
Comments
Don't know what you're so
Don't know what you're so disappointed about with Obama's campaign promises. Lets rely more on empirical evidence instead of subjective opinions:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
In regard to the "draconian
In regard to the "draconian measures" taken by the music industry in Europe, I can't help referring readers to Andrew Keen's book "Cult of the Amateur", particularly the two chapters entitled "The day the Music Died, Parts I and II". The music industry is behaving in no more of a draconian way than the $20 billion dollars of annual music theft demands and warrants. Or, as Keen puts it: "Imagine a coffee shop where only 1 person out of 40 pays for their latte. That's the current economics of the music business". Downloaders should be hung from the highest tree and made examples of, or else there will be no more good music, because there will be no more incentive put in the time and effort, because there will be no money to be made in music. Unless you enjoy unwatchable YouTube and MySpace performances done on cheap equipment by amateurs with day jobs, get behind these music executives, who are (finally) trying to reclaim their business.
@anonymous who reads andrew keen
i don't know what exactly andrew keen has been listening to but i'm sure he is a big madonna or britney fan since only those type of "musicians" will die because of piracy. in order to make someone madonna or lady gaga you really need to spend some millons of dollars just for the disguise. so they must sell records.
music has always been and will always be. plus there's was still music when these companies were not around and that music was still good. what kind of a fool would believe that these companies created what we call "good music". they just took it from the guy who was making and sold it to you. then they started to sell everything whether it was good or bad so they made trillions of dollars by selling %90 bad music... they failed. btw mp3 sales are incredibly high right now for indie labels but not for the suckers who want to come to your door with the police because you listen to music. and you know why? because they sell bad music and indies sell better music. surprise!!
The music industry had it's
The music industry had it's chance. It blew it.
At no point in human history has music been guaranteed to make money. You think every bard made a million? Every crooner in every pub throughout history has sought to become wealthy and famous. Even Shakespeare pulled himself up by the bootstraps without the middleman of a "music industry"
All that the Music Industry does is act as clearing house for big corporations to make billions by telling consumers who they must listen too, and screw anyone who doesn't play the game by their rules.
Those "unwatchable YouTube and MySpace performances done on cheap equipment by amateurs with day jobs" are the real music industry, the one that the record executives want deader than a doornail because they are a threat to their money making machine. After all, if we actually can pick and choose for ourselves what we like, rather than allowing them to expose us to the 1% that they feel will make them the most money, we might, like, actually find alternatives to their strangle hold.
So, screw the record execs. Screw the massive media empires of every sort. They can either adapt to the times, realize the market is demanding freedom and personal choice, or they can cling to the outdated methods by which they once managed to force their choices on a world that has told them to fuck off, and piss that world off even more.
DRM, the RIAA, and all the rest of it is nothing more than attempts to slam a wall down between musicians and their audience, a wall in which the record companies control the door. Downloaders are the guys who have yanked that wall down and will keep doing so until the wall is finally gone for good.
And the sooner, the better. And once it's done, Talent will once again be the deciding factor behind a bands success or failure, not whether a Music Exec thinks they will make the exec money.
And then maybe we'll finally be done with the likes of Britney Spears and "Boy bands"
Are political implotion of larger groups inevitable?
The political infighting was the saddest thing to see. And it's very unattractive from the outside. Seems to have calmed lately. But I see those problems resurfacing. Political implosion of larger groups seems a human inevitable.
Also the personality types attracted to this area, tend to be harsh communicators. Many seem to like and thrive on debate and controversy—creating drama storms. Which is tiring for many people.
Who wants to be involved with people who can't disagree honorably? There's this attitude of, if you disagree I'm going to shove my view at you anyway—your stupid and irrational.
gloves off
HaHa rightwing religous fanatics your base is growing old and dying.
My candidates for two of the most interesting ideas of 2009.
1. Socialist feminism as "beta aversion":
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/006761.html
2. Asian hillbilly cultures as spontaneous resistance to "civilization":
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/06/the_mystery_...
Okay, now that I got the
Okay, now that I got the political response out of the way, let me respond to the rest of the list.
1: Nanotech. From the beginning months of this year with the creation of a two armed DNA based "Bot" to the latest news that Graphene can directly replace copper in current VLSI circuit manufacturing processes, this has been a massively productive year in the development of nanotech and computers in general. I've been discussing this (or rather trying to get a discussion going) over at Imminst. Based on the developments in computer technology this year, we're about to see a couple of dramatic revolutions in electronics as chipmakers resume the GHz wars with superfast graphene chips, electronic manufacturers in general make the switch to fast printing manufacturing models, and we see a dramatic decline in electronics cost while computing power jumps through the roof. All due to fallout tech from nanotech research.
2: Cognitive Liberty. About time too. Hopefully by the next elections we will have finally dropped this ridiculous hypocrisy and stopped imprisoning people for consensual crimes.
3: Dollhouse. I may just have to see if I can hunt down episodes to watch now. I really haven't been able to watch it on tv due to work hours.
4: Stemcells. Another massive set of breakthroughs in one year. Britain has made some pretty impressive stuff, like whole blood, and stemcells instead of silicon for breast enhancement. Given the speed with which advancements have come since the moratorium has been lifted, I do wonder how much we might have accomplished over the last ten years if Bush had not tried to force his religious ideology on science.
5: Transcendent Man. While I do not agree with Ray on everything, I will certainly agree he is one of the best researched and most scientific of all futurists, including myself. The main thing I disagree with him on is timelines. Based on my observations for the last 20 years, I think some things are going to come both much earlier and later than he predicts. The second thing I disagree with him on is his failure to include VR as one of his keystones to the future, VR is as important as G, N, and R, because 1. It will arrive first. (Indeed it can be built today. Once the Project Natal controller is released, it will actually be pretty quickly developed into a consumer form, so for all intents could be seen as having fulfilled Ray's prediction of basic VR in 09) and 2. It will drive the demand for the other 3. Once we have a real practical VR system, personal universal avatars, and portable vr/networking smartphones, we're going to want to make a lot of VR into reality, much as we turned Star Trek's communicators into our current cellphones.
So, I would basically have to say kudos for the five best. Will be interesting what else people come up with.
As for the five worst?
1: Recession. People will probably hate me for saying this, but this is a sad necessity as we begin the turbulent and chaotic transition between our current system of scarcity to a economy of abundance. It's going to get worse. The Giants are dying and doing their best to flail about for any lifeline they can grab onto. It was going to occur no matter who did what. Perhaps it was delayed by Bush or hastened by him, I can't say, but the old corporate system was doomed regardless. As printing becomes the dominant manufacturing paradigm, and the internet continues to grow into more sections of the world, I expect many more huge businesses to falter and collapse. It's not all gloom and doom though, as it is likely that these dying giants will spur the growth of many new companies which are far less hidebound by old Industrial Era ideas, as well as encourage the creation of more economical, and eco-friendly, small scale manufacturing companies using inexpensive 3d printers and electronics printers. These small companies will likely specialize in extreme customization and fast product turnover. While never as profitable as the old giants, these will pave the way for true home based manufacturing units and inevitably lead to an economy of abundance.
2: Obama. See other post. It was important enough I didn't want to see it lost amid the rest.
3: The Music Industry. While it's a pity they still think they can get away with this, it's really only a sign of how quickly they are falling. Give the public a few dozen cases of this kind of heavy handed corporate profit protection, and the backlash is likely to shatter the music industry permanently. I will lay you odds that this will be overturned within two elections, and the music industry will come out of it with such a bad rep that DRM might just become a dirty word.
4: Terminator. ummm, no, I just refuse to go there.
5: Transhuman vs Transhuman As a fellow hybrid ( I find much of the conservative, liberal, and libertarian views to be illogical and inconsistent and do not consider myself any of them) I think I shall refrain from putting my two cents in here unless asked specific question on my views. I've been arguing with all sides at various times, I think. Part of the problem with being a demoness I suppose. I can't resist being a devil's advocate at times XPPPPPP
To be honest, I understand
To be honest, I understand politics well enough to know that a president can promise the sky, but then be utterly unable to deliver.
I do think Obama has made a few mistakes, but then no president in history has ever been handed the mess he was given. Nor had to deal with so many screaming extreme leftwingers going "YOU'VE BEEN PRESIDENT FOR SO MANY HOURS WHY ISN'T EVERYTHING FIXED YET???" and so many extreme rightwingers going "DO IT MY WAY OR I'LL GET MY GUN AND SHOOT YA!!!"
Obama is a centrist. And simply put, we needed a centrist, because a radical left winger would have simply plunged this nation into utter chaos. We've been steered far too much right, but a jerk to the wheel left would have more than likely simply caused utter mayhem to erupt even worse than it already has.
The GOP cannot cope with the fact that they were rejected. They are suffering a political meltdown of epic proportions, and yet are still too powerful to simply ignore. Our government has become a corrupt clearinghouse for corporate interests that has no connection to the American People anymore because of the undue control of government the GOP has had for too long. There was never a scenario where Obama was going to be able to fulfill all his promises, let alone in the first year.
But I don't really look at what he HASN'T done. He's still got three years to work on making those promises come true. The real story isn't whether he's kept his promises or not yet.
What Obama has done that no other president has done is actually far more important, but so subtle that I think almost everyone has missed it, and its importance.
Obama has made Our Government front page news.
For the last thirty years D.C. has been an "oh yeah, and in washington..." It's been the story told to fill in the last five minutes of a newscast, or to fill the last page of a paper. Which starlet has been seen sleeping with which star always seemed to be far more important than what was happening in the halls of power.
Not anymore. For the last year, most of America's attention has been focused on D.C. Sure we noticed Balloon Boy, and Tiger Woods, gossiped about Facebook and twitted about Twitter, but these were bylines for THE BIG STORY, which has been a blow by blow, day by day, year long torturous soap opera of our government in action. For the first time EVER, our government has been exposed to the constant eye of public attention. We've followed congress and Obama like paparazzi chasing Paris Hilton hoping for the next crotch shot.
And the fact is plain that the government, congress in particular, has no real clue how to deal with it. The fact that their glaringly obvious catering to the special interests groups and their own careers has been broadcast LIVE daily seems to have simply not penetrated their psyches. If they truly understood what that attention is going to mean for their futures, I have a feeling that much of this last year would have been quite different.
I think Obama understands that better than congress does, but I don't think even he is fully aware of what it may result in.
Whether we were ready for it or not, our government just became vastly more transparent, and we Americans have been shown exactly how bad we've allowed things to become by our inattention.
2010 is going to be a political bloodbath indeed, but I doubt that anyone is willing to admit to the strong likelihood that BOTH parties will be feeling the pain, or that by the end of it, the two party system may be dead in the water as a true MULTI-party system emerges.
Obama never had a chance to make anything happen in the current political mess. He could have promised that the sun would rise in the east every morning, and been opposed violently by the GOP. He was playing against a deck stacked against him in every way possible.
But after November 2010, he may end up playing from an entirely new deck.
And maybe THEN we'll see some REAL reform.
Post new comment